


Catch and Release

by McSpot



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, San Jose Sharks, Team Feels, Washington Capitals, that means I made up my own AU again, whoops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-11
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-02-26 14:44:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23102638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/McSpot/pseuds/McSpot
Summary: If a player gets forced onto the opposing team's bench during play, that player officially becomes a member of their team.  There's a whole system to catching players, with strategies determining who the prime targets are and the best way to catch them.Nobody expected Mario to be caught.
Comments: 217
Kudos: 411





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted over three parts on Tumblr. This fic was inspired because I saw [this post](https://swedishgoaliemafia.tumblr.com/post/190866951029) of Brad Marchand trying to force Robby Fabbri onto the Bruins bench, and my brain is dumb. So I created a whole AU where if a team can force an opposing player onto their bench during the game, they get to keep the player, if they have enough cap space. I made way too many rules figuring out the logistics of how this works.
> 
> This fic pretends to be deep but it's actually not. It has the depth of a particularly sparse puddle. I just wanted team feels.
> 
> Usual warnings about how I don't edit and I write most things very late at night when I'm tired and my eyes are crap.
> 
> Two stunning things about this fic: the title is NOT a song lyric, and I did not use the league schedule to make this fic and in fact I fabricated! game dates!! CAN YOU BELIEVE???

Nobody expected Mario to be caught.

Players who everyone tried to catch were star forwards on cheap contracts – bridge contracts were especially popular – and pending UFAs that could be used for the playoffs or flipped for another rental. Once in a while someone would gun for the Johnny Gaudreau-type, a franchise player with a price to match, but rarely did they have the cap space to keep them.

That was the one thing that people outside of hockey didn't understand. They thought it was like the Wild West, with a penalty system built-in to allow for fistfights and physical aggression on the ice, and another system letting a team essentially kidnap another team's player in the middle of the game and keep them for their own, as long as they could haul them onto their bench.

What they never understood was that even if you caught a player, you could only keep them if you could afford them. Most teams didn't have the cap space available to take on another big contract, meaning that if they couldn't make space within the twenty-four hour grace period after the catch, they'd have to send the caught player back to their original team – and pay a significant fine to the league for pulling that player from the game and inconveniencing the other team.

But rookies on their cheap, standardized entry-level contracts – well, rookies were easy-pickings. Young, naive, often a little bit smaller because they hadn't fully filled out yet, and without much training in how to keep themselves from being caught. Rookies were great fodder for a catch, because most teams could easily make room for their contracts and it was so easy to move them around, send them to the AHL or use them as part of another trade if you wanted.

All you had to do was wait for an unsuspecting rookie to get near the opposing team's bench, and one check into the bench and they'd be caught, and the team would be up one more rookie.

Really, the Sharks should have prepared Mario better. Mario should have _known_ better. A rookie in his first year in the NHL, fresh from college, meaning he'd never played in a catching league before, and he was small for a defenseman. He was ripe for the picking.

But they had plenty of rookies on the team in a season plagued by injury right from the start, rookies who were better-known outside of San Jose than Mario, had more hype about them. Honestly, the team was a tire fire this year, and nobody's prime concern was practicing drills with Mario on how to avoid being caught.

So Mario hadn't done any, had never been trained to have an awareness of how close he was to the other team's bench when he skated in for line changes, never been shown how to avoid a hip check near the benches, how to flop to the ice and make yourself as hard to move as possible until your teammates could come to bail you out, how to make yourself dead weight if they tried to drag you by your jersey. (Back in the day if they tried to grab you by your jersey you could just take it off in order to get away, but Rob Ray ruined that for everyone by stripping every time he got in a fight.)

And that meant that Mario was right there near Washington's bench, small and portable and unsuspecting, when it happened.

It was a home game, and the Caps had just tried to clear the puck from their zone, sending it along the boards near the benches. Mario was skating after the puck, trying to take possession and send it back up the ice to Timo, who was ready to take it right back into the offensive zone. Just as he caught the puck on the toe of his stick and was turning to make the pass, he caught a quick glimpse of a white jersey and the next thing he knew he was being crushed into the boards, the breath sucked from him and the ledge of the bench digging sharply into his side.

He was sure he'd be more than a little bruised, and Mario shook his head, trying to breathe through the pain. It was difficult because whoever had checked him into the boards wasn't letting him up, but the refs wouldn't make the fucking call for interference or boarding even though Mario had dropped his stick and definitely didn't have the puck anymore.

But then, the refs weren't really in the business of calling penalties in San Jose's favor this year, were they?

Nothing happened in San Jose's favor.

Or, apparently, in Mario's.

He started to struggle, trying to get his pinned arms up to shove at whoever was basically fucking crushing him.

"What the – fuck!" There were hands on him, grabbing roughly from his other side, pulling none-too-gently on his arms, his jersey. Then someone grabbed under his arms and he was being hauled upwards and back, the boards scraping roughly along his torso until he was spun around and-

"Hi," TJ Oshie said, smiling widely. He squeezed his arms around Mario's waist, which was about the moment that Mario realized that he was somehow sitting in TJ Oshie's lap, on the visitor's bench.

The Capitals bench.

He was sitting on the bench of the Washington Capitals, surrounded by the Capitals, who had just dragged him over the boards, and, and-

"Caught you!" Alexander Ovechkin sing-cheered, jostling Mario's helmet with a rough hand.

No.

_No_.

No, no, no no no oh please fuck _no_-

He could fucking hear himself now, back in one of his videos, talking about how much he loved the Sharks, how proud he was to play for them, how he wanted to be a Shark for the rest of his career and here he was on the fucking Capitals bench and SAP Center was fucking _exploding_ and Mario had let himself be caught. He was so fucking stupid, not thinking about where he was on the ice, where he was in comparison to the other team's bench and if he loved the Sharks so much he would have done a better fucking job of not getting caught, wouldn't he?

But how could he have known? Jumbo never drilled him on how to fight off catching players like he did with Gamby and Mario had just figured that the team would know best if anyone was gunning for him.

Mario's chest felt tight under the layers of his gear, like it was difficult to breathe, like it hurt, and maybe that was his ribs or maybe that was the fact that he was fucking panicking because there was no conceivable way to fuck up worse than getting fucking stolen from your team.

"Wait – Lars! This one is 38, we want _28_! You got the wrong one!"

Ovechkin's boisterous shouts were shards of ice stabbing at his heart.

Of course, they hadn't even fucking wanted him, they were aiming for Timo, which made so much more sense to be honest because everyone was gunning for Timo, even with his expensive contract, but apparently Eller misread the jersey of who he was crunching into the boards and caught Mario instead, because the only way anyone would want to catch him would be as an _accident_.

The irrational part of his wildly beating heart, the part that was shrieking with denial of the whole thing, was insisting that they could just toss him back. If they didn't want to catch him, if it had been a mistake, they could just hand him right back to the Sharks.

Catch and release, like a fucking fish. It would be fitting for a Shark.

But even as his hands tingled with numbness in his gloves and the sound around him blurred, he knew that wasn't possible. An unsuccessful catch was enough to get a double minor for delay of game, but catching a player and then deciding you didn't actually want him, right there on the bench, was penalized the same as not being able to afford the player after the one-day grace period. And no team wanted to face those financial penalties – especially because if you did it enough, you'd start forfeiting draft picks.

Even if the Caps didn't want to keep him long-term, they'd still be best off just trying to trade him to another team, get something in return for him.

Because as everyone knew-

"You're a rookie, right?" Eller was saying, leaning far over the boards to peer into Mario's face. "Ovi, he's a rookie, it's fine. What's your name?"

"Ferraro," Oshie said, reading the nameplate on the back of Mario's jersey.

Nobody seemed to need Mario's input here. Then again, none of this situation required his input. His input was doing a bad job of being a defenseman if he couldn't even defend himself, and the Caps were clearly taking it from there. He was still sitting in a stranger's lap in the middle of a hockey game and he couldn't get himself to move because he wasn't sure he could still feel his feet. It was like someone else was sitting in Oshie's lap in full Sharks gear, hyperventilating, and Mario was just watching it happen.

"He wasn't on the board," someone said on Mario's other side. He couldn't make his body work to turn and see who it was. He might not even know anyway, because Mario didn't know who most of the Capitals were.

The Capitals. His team, because he was on their bench, and he wasn't a Shark anymore, no matter the crest on his jersey.

"Doesn't have to be on the board," Eller was saying, still so casual, like he hadn't just destroyed Mario's life. "The board is who management wants, but rookies are always fine. They can just flip him for something else if they want."

It was like he wasn't there at all. He knew he was, because that was the problem, but they all talked over his head and around him like he was furniture.

"Oh, you're bleeding," Oshie said quietly, his face far too close to Mario's. Slowly, like a computer that was lagging, Mario tried to follow his gaze. He thought maybe Oshie would be talking about his side, if the check had messed him up worse than he thought, or maybe his shattered heart was leaking through and staining the teal of his jersey, but-

He flinched when Oshie's glove came up and prodded at his lip, gasped a huge, shuddering, unhelpful breath that hurt and did nothing to fill his lungs. He tasted copper then.

Oh. He'd bitten his lip.

He ran his tongue over it. It stung, but it wasn't too bad. The burning in his lungs was worse.

Everyone jumped when a blur of teal slammed into Eller, roaring, "You _fucker_!"

They went to the ice in front of the bench and Mario couldn't see who it was, couldn't imagine who would be that angry over him. They shouldn't be. Mario wasn't even two months into his first season as a Shark. His first season in the NHL. Not long enough for anyone to get emotional over him being caught.

Well. Mario was getting emotional over it, but he didn't have a right to be upset because it was his fault anyway.

The Capitals were surging forward to yell over the boards and grab whoever was down there, and more teal jerseys were streaking across the ice and the distant roar of the crowd was growing louder but Mario couldn't hear anything but his own heartbeat. People were jostling him, pushing and shoving and not even noticing how they pinned and crushed him against Oshie because they were too busy fighting with whoever was on the ice and it made sense because Mario had become nothing but chattel about sixty seconds ago and his feelings didn't matter anymore.

You didn't ask the furniture if it was hurt.

Oshie shifted under him and then somehow the both of them were over the other side of the bench, away from the developing scrum, and Oshie was propping Mario up against the boards behind the bench when his knees turned to gelatin.

"Whoa, there, you doing okay, buddy? You don't look too good."

Not waiting for a response, because nobody needed Mario's response, Oshie called to someone on Mario's other side, "Hey, can we take him off yet? He's looking rough."

"Not until Toronto approves the catch," a bored voice called back.

Of course, Toronto was the only thing standing between Mario and losing the life he'd only just been allowed to love. Any catch had to go to video review in Toronto to make sure it was clean, lest it be found that the catching team used "injurious force" or, more commonly, the player being caught had embellished the catch because they wanted to leave their original team. Someone in Toronto would be reviewing the catch, watching it from all angles, to make sure that it didn't look like Mario just let himself be caught, like he somehow wanted the Capitals to catch him because he wanted a new team. They were deciding right now if Mario was going to get fined and suspended for trying to become a Capital.

It was only a good catch if they put up a fight.

Inanely, Mario prayed that he looked like he'd made it easy. He prayed that it looked like he hadn't tried to defend himself at all and everyone would think he was trying to escape the Sharks for a team with a winning record, because then they'd have to send him back. Then he could stay a Shark. The Sharks would hate him for trying to leave that way, but they'd hate him for leaving too. There was no winning.

He hadn't defended himself. That part would be true.

But maybe he could earn his way back, with enough time and enough convincing, prove to them how much he cared about this team and this town even in the short amount of time he'd been here, and they'd maybe one day believe him that he wasn't trying to get away, that he wasn't, wasn't fucking Matt Duchene flinging himself onto every bench trying to get away from the team he didn't want to be on anymore. Mario wanted to be a Shark, for the good parts and the bad.

"Please, please, please, please," a whispered litany under his breath, because he didn't have any breath and the mumbled prayers felt more productive than breathing anyway.

He hadn't even seen the ref skating to the middle of the ice, but he did hear when the call came through, "We have a good catch!"

Whatever was going on in front of the bench exploded, the fans were deafening and the boos were oppressively crushing in their weight. Mario felt every one on his chest, compressing his lungs, and he nearly fell to his knees when Oshie prodded him from behind, "Come on, let's get you out of here, you look like shit, man."

Someone else grabbed him from the front, pulled him past the coaching staff, who were swearing a blue streak at someone on the ice, past the yelling players and the jeering fans. Mario didn't even flinch when the beer landed on him, but whatever staff member was tugging him along shouted, "Fuck!"

Mario almost apologized to him for getting splashed with what was clearly meant for him, but his lips felt numb. He tried biting his lip again and the sting was there, but lessened.

"Kid, will you fucking breathe? _Jesus Christ,_" someone growled, like they couldn't tell that he was trying to, that he could only do so much with the weight on his chest.

"MacLellan better trade this one fast," a voice grumbled. Mario didn't think he was supposed to hear that, but it didn't really matter. That's what he was now, just a pawn to be shifted around as-needed, for the benefit of a team that wasn't his. He probably would get traded, and that team wouldn't be his either.

The Sharks weren't his team. He was wearing their jersey, but it was a good catch. He was a Washington Capital in name now, if not spirit.

But he didn't have a team, and that was his fault.

If he'd wanted to be a Shark so badly, he should have tried harder.

~~~

The next few minutes were a blur. Unfamiliar men wearing Caps paraphernalia were instructing him to take off his Sharks gear "so we can send it over."

Mario wasn't quite sure what that was supposed to mean; it wasn't like the Sharks were really going to want to reuse his gear, except for possibly his helmet, and there sure wouldn't be a lot of fan interest in a game-worn Mario Ferraro jersey.

Not from a team he got stolen from only two months into his career.

But he did as he was bade, and let them direct him towards the shower while someone told him they'd "send someone to pick up his stuff." His movements were mechanical, rote, showering quickly even though he knew that using the generic shampoo in the visitors' showers was going to make his hair do weird things.

When he came back out, his belongings were all shoved into a spare stall at the end of the row. He froze to see it like that, towel around his waist, hair dripping water down his shoulders.

Someone had taken it upon themselves to go through the Sharks' dressing room and shove all of his worldly belongings into his duffle bag – his clothes, his extra gear, and looking more closely, the contents of his stall and his locker. It made him feel violated in a way, seeing that someone had touched his phone, his toiletries, his wallet, the picture of him with his family on draft day. Someone he didn't know had unceremoniously taken every scrap of him that could be found in SAP Center and tossed it together in one bag with his sticks bundled neatly on top.

It would probably fit, too. He hadn't been there that long.

He shouldn't have been so bothered. This was the least of the rights he'd lost in the last hour.

Mario made quick work of pulling his suit on, doing his best to organize his things more neatly into his bag. It looked strange, this Sharks equipment bag full of his personal belongings and the pieces of his gear that weren't Sharks-branded. Everything but his base layer, his skates, and his pads would be replaced when they got to Washington.

His stomach twisted sharply at the thought. He'd have to get use to it, thinking of himself as a Capital. It didn't feel real, but he knew with a sickening sense of clarity that this was not a nightmare he'd be waking up from.

He told himself that it would get easier with time.

That didn't mean he believed it.

Another man he didn't know told him that they had to stop by Mario's place to pick up the rest of his belongings. Mario didn't know why he hadn't considered it, that he'd need to go get the rest of his stuff before going to Washington. Really, he was lucky that he was having the chance to grab anything; if he'd been caught on the road, he'd have had to hire someone to pack up his things or wait until he had a few off days in a row to fly back to San Jose and fetch essentials.

He was being afforded an opportunity that a lot of players in his position didn't have.

Mario should have felt appreciative, but all he felt was numb.

They took Mario's car to his apartment – or what he called an apartment, but was really just a long-term hotel. An actual San Jose apartment was expensive for a guy living on his own, even if he was making NHL money. Most of the guys on the Cuda couldn't afford to live on their own and they'd all end up bunking up together; Mario hadn't even bothered looking for his own place so early on.

The man still hadn't introduced himself, or what he did for the team, but he had a polo shirt with the Caps logo on it, and Mario supposed that was all that mattered. It wasn't really relevant that Mario knew his name, just that he did as he was told.

Maybe he'd forgotten that Mario didn't already know who he was. Maybe he didn't care.

It felt strange, showing this man into his home. Evaluative in a way, taking a stranger and showing him where he'd been living, watching him give the anonymous furnishings an unimpressed glance. After a moment's pause, watching the man, Mario remembered what he was there for and went to his bedroom, pulling out all the bags and suitcases he had.

How was he supposed to do this? He probably couldn't take everything all at once; he hadn't amassed a lot while he'd been here, but it wasn't like he was prepared to just pack it all up at a moment's notice and have it ready to go before the Caps were due to fly out.

It was like his brain was functioning at half-speed. Everything felt important and also like something he could worry about later.

Maybe he didn't actually have that much? The dishes and the pots and pans and all that came with the unit, and so did the furniture. It really was just a big hotel suite at the end of the day, so he needed – clothes. He needed his clothes, as much as he could take, because he had no fucking idea what the weather was like in D.C. and they'd probably be going on road trips. Or no, he knew they would be. So he'd need – suits, he needed more than just the suit he was wearing.

Everything was getting cleared from the closet, tossed on the bed. Did he own the – no, the linens came with the unit, and the towels, but he did have those towels that his mom gave him too, he should take those and – the bathroom, he had to get his stuff from the bathroom, or otherwise he'd keep using the generic shampoo and his curls would be a frizzy mess. They probably already were, because he didn't take care of them properly after the game – during the game, the game wasn't over yet, _fuck_, he got caught in the first period, everyone else was still playing the game, the Sharks and the Caps back at it like Mario hadn't been caught, like he'd just been deleted in the middle of the game, and-

Mario tasted blood again, the sting in his lip bringing him back to reality. He hadn't realized that he bit it so much.

Okay. Logic. He needed his electronics. He used those all the time and it wasn't safe to leave them behind either.

It got a little bit easier after that, when he took that step outside himself again and watched this much calmer Mario go about quickly shoving his belongings into bags, scanning each room like he would a hotel room on the road, cataloguing what was his and what belonged to the building.

When he came back into the kitchen, the man from the Capitals was texting somebody. "I threw your perishables in the trash," he said, not looking up from the phone. "Didn't want to leave an unhappy surprise for the cleaning service."

It was considerate of him, Mario knew, and part of him appreciated it. But a bigger part of him, the part he wasn't speaking to right now, kind of felt a little bit like crying.

Everything sounded so final.

He didn't want it to be final.

The man watched disinterestedly as Mario went around the living room, grabbing up his belongings. "We don't have too much time," he called. "You almost done?"

Mario would have told him that he was pretty sure he was done, but his hands were shaking too much to get the zipper closed on his suitcase and he couldn't be done if the suitcase wasn't closed. It took far too many tries to get it done, to get all the bags closed and to look around the bedroom again, the bathroom. He double-checked every drawer, peeked in the closet, because he had to have more than this, there was no way it all fit, maybe he didn't check – no, he got all of his shoes, had tossed them in a trash bag because needs-must and they'd probably be mostly okay getting knocked around a bit.

He stepped back and stared at the pile of bags on his bed, on the floor.

It all fit. He should have felt relieved; he didn't have to have a moving service come through.

It all fit. He hadn't lived in San Jose long enough to have that much to take.

It all fit. He wouldn't have to come back to get anything.

"Hey, are you- oh, awesome, is this everything?"

Mario nodded numbly.

"Yeah. Everything fit."

Mario drove them back to SAP Center, though maybe he shouldn't have, because he didn't remember a single moment of the drive. The still-unnamed man helped Mario haul all of his bags to the bus that would take the Caps to the airport.

"We made good time," the man said, as someone else appeared and helped him fit things into the cargo hold of the bus. Mario wondered if maybe they were both equipment staff. "The boys are just getting dressed now – 3-1 win."

It took Mario a moment to realize that "the boys" were the Capitals. The game had been scoreless when he'd been caught.

At least him being gone hadn't kept the Sharks from scoring, even if they lost the game.

The man told Mario he could find a seat on the bus. When Mario started to ask what was to be done with his car, the man just held a hand out for the keys. "It's a lease, right? We'll get someone from the Sharks to handle it. Don't worry about it."

It was better, Mario supposed, to turn in a lease early than try to have it taken across the country when your whole life got uprooted. He could just get a new car in D.C. If people usually drove in D.C. He'd never been before. He had no fucking clue what the city looked like.

Apparently he'd be finding out soon.

Or not. He had no clue where the Capitals were going next, but he was already on the bus, ready to go.

Mario laughed, at first, giggling to himself in the back row of an empty bus, toque pulled down to cover the disaster of his hair and head pressed to the window. He laughed because it was absurd, this whole situation, this whole practice, that he could be a Shark at the start of the game and a Capital by the end of it, that a few hours ago he was sitting in his stall laughing as he watched Erik and Dilly bitch about each other's hair and now he was a fucking Washington Capital and it was his own damn fault.

He didn't notice when the tears started, when the laughter turned to choking on big, hiccupping sobs, but he supposed it was all one in the same.

If nobody was around to see it happen, it probably didn't.

Mario didn't react as the Capitals started filing onto the bus. They didn't react to him either. It was like he was invisible, sitting there in the back, staring blankly out the window. Maybe they thought he'd want space.

They should have known by now that what he wanted didn't really matter.

Everyone was in good spirits despite the late hour, a sign of a solid win. Maybe they figured now was the time to chat because they'd all sleep on the plane.

The Sharks didn't fly out immediately after a game. "Too many old men," Jumbo had told him. They'd rather sleep in a hotel and fly out early in the morning than make everyone sleep on a plane and be exhausted the next morning.

The Caps were a little bit younger, he supposed. Or at least, Ovechkin would never admit to aging, no matter how silver his hair got.

Mario startled when a shadow loomed over his seat. He looked up.

Holtby was there, watching him with an inscrutable expression. He was wearing one of those Amish-looking hats that Mario made fun of Burnzie for trying to pull off, and it felt a little ridiculous to feel so intimidated by someone in a hat like that, but Mario still felt himself sinking in his seat.

"Is this – do you want me to move?"

For a moment longer Holtby just stayed there, unmoving, eyes narrowed.

"No," he said, and then in one fluid move he settled himself into the seat next to Mario. He took his hat off and settled it on his lap, and then he looked up at Mario.

"Welcome to the team. I'm Braden."

He didn't offer a hand to shake. He just continued staring at Mario with that same blank expression.

Mario stared back. "Um, thanks," he mumbled.

It was, he realized, the first time someone had bothered to introduce themselves all night.

When Holtby – because it felt too bizarre to just start calling him Braden, like they were friends – didn't say anything else, Mario slumped towards the window again, trying to edge as close to it as he could to give Holtby more space. The last thing he needed was somebody getting on him for throwing off the starting goaltender's routines.

"Is this, um, is this where you usually sit?"

Holtby was digging in his pocket, pulling out his phone. "No."

"...oh."

There was no ceremony to it as the bus pulled away from SAP Center. It was a trip Mario had taken multiple times before by now, but not nearly as many as he'd have liked. God, he'd barely even been here, and he'd put so much stock into staying with the Sharks long-term. He felt like such an idiot, imagining a future like that and being the first one to fuck it up. It wasn't even like he was traded, packaged up in a deal with some draft picks and prospects for a better player. Management had been fine keeping him.

He'd just fucked it up on his own.

"They're a bit forgetful."

Mario jumped hard enough that his head bounced off the window. He blinked, trying to refocus his vision on Holtby.

"I'm sorry?"

Holtby watched him placidly. "The boys. They're not trying to be jerks, even though they're doing a good job of it."

Well, if he had to put that fine a point on it, better him than Mario.

"I didn't think..."

Holtby snorted and shook his head. There was maybe a ghost of a smile at the edge of his lip, and he nudged Mario gently with his arm. "Even Ovi didn't come introduce himself properly. They're being assholes. They don't know what it's like to be caught."

"But you weren't..."

Goalies, as a rule, weren't usually caught. Similarly to having a goalie for a captain, it wasn't that it wasn't legal under the NHL's rules, but more that it just wasn't practical. There were very few opportunities to catch a goalie during gameplay, as they were typically only near the benches if they were being pulled for an extra attacker – and they were smart enough to leave some space between themselves and the opposing bench.

It was also just a fact that any goalie worth stealing was usually going to be on a pretty hefty contract. There was a particularly famous clip from the 2011 playoffs of Duncan Keith attempting to catch Roberto Luongo when he was pulled for a delayed penalty, resulting in Luongo punching him in the stomach with his blocker while very audibly yelling, "_You can't afford me!_"

(Luongo received a roughing penalty, but Keith's penalty for a failed catch still put the Canucks on the two-man advantage. They'd scored, and the clip still regularly made the rounds in highlight compilations.)

Goalies weren't normally used as catchers for the same reason. It was pretty damn dangerous to leave your goal empty just to have the goalie try to swoop in and shove someone over the boards – and you'd better be damn sure you wanted that player, if you were going to risk being scored on to get them.

Holtby shrugged. "I've never been caught. But neither have they." He smirked a little bit. "Marcus Johansson got stolen by the Bruins from the Devils last year, and they think they all understand what it feels like by virtue of being friends with him."

"Oh."

Mario bit his lip, nodded because he didn't know what else to do. "I mean, I'm not, like..."

He trailed off. He didn't know what he wasn't. But Holtby didn't seem to mind, nudging Mario's arm again.

"You don't have to be offended for it to be true. They think it's like being traded. They don't get that it's more personal than that."

Teeth dug harder into skin, pulling at the thin scab.

Personal was one way to put it. Crippling guilt and self-recrimination was another.

Most players had little to no control over being traded, but they had a lot of personal responsibility for being caught.

"It's my fault," he said quietly.

Holtby did something halfway between a nod and a shrug. "Maybe. You definitely didn't look like you knew how to react, but that could be on the Sharks as much as it is on you. They should have drilled you better on it if they didn't want you to get caught."

Unless they didn't really care if he was caught or not, of course.

"But it doesn't matter now. You're a Cap now, and I promise by morning they'll have remembered how to get their heads out of their asses."

Mario smiled tightly. "Oh yeah, for sure."

The scab on his lip pulled taut, cracked open, and the taste of blood filled his mouth.

It didn't matter.

Washington was...fine. Holtby had been right about the Caps warming up to him more come morning. They were, apparently, playing the Kings next, and the hotel breakfast was a pretty raucous affair.

Everything about the Washington Capitals, Mario would soon learn, was a raucous affair.

Ovechkin made a point of coming over and welcoming him to the team with a handshake-turned-bro-hug, laughing loudly about how "can't believe we grab wrong guy, you just so small, it was so easy!"

The guys seemed to find this incredibly entertaining.

Mario smiled, and said nothing.

Part of the Caps being a generally loud and active team was that Mario really didn't have to talk to participate in conversations. The same theme from the first night continued, where someone would ask Mario a question and then half-answer it themselves a breath later. Mario had an entire conversation with Tom Wilson where he was fairly sure he didn't say more than fifteen words, but by the end of it Wilson was slapping him on the back and declaring him "a good guy."

One time Backstrom caught him in the dressing room, watching him with narrowed eyes.

"You don't talk much, do you?" he'd asked.

It had taken Mario by surprise. He'd never seen himself as a particularly quiet guy; actually, some of the guys on the Sharks would have probably liked to find his mute button.

"Just...don't have a lot to say, I guess."

Backstrom had watched him for a moment longer, and then shrugged. "Well, I'm sure you've noticed things get loud here. You better speak up if you want to be heard."

It was nice enough advice, Mario figured, if a bit ironic coming from the one man who could command the dressing room with his silence.

But Mario didn't particularly think he wanted to be heard. It wasn't a lie that he didn't really have anything meaningful to say.

Playing for the Capitals wasn't awful. He did okay. He got minutes every night, didn't get scratched or sent down, which he'd assumed.

He also didn't get traded immediately, and from his brief talk with MacLellan, they weren't looking to move him right away.

"You're a young guy with a lot of potential," MacLellan said, "We didn't plan on you coming here, but I want to give you a chance to grow, see what you do."

He'd been smiling, and Mario should have taken pride in his words. The GM had faith in him. He thought Mario could make a difference on their team.

Mario didn't know why it didn't make him happy.

There was something inside him that couldn't settle down, not with the team, not with his new hotel room (because D.C. real estate? _Also_ ridiculous). It was the dumbest thing, because it wasn't like he'd been in San Jose long enough to really call that his home either.

But there was this disconnect, this feeling as if he still wasn't living his real life. Like this was a dream or a movie he was watching and once this was done he'd eventually go back to what he was meant to be doing. He put in the work at practice and showed up to team functions and met fans and smiled and broke that scab on his lip again and again.

"It's a lack of closure," Holtby told him one night on the road. He'd invited Mario to his room to have coffee and watch sitcoms, which had sounded like some sort of code until it turned out to be exactly what it said on the tin. Holtby had taken it upon himself to be Mario's guide to the Washington Capitals, out of some heavily misplaced sense of personal obligation.

"It means you're special," Kuznetsov had said once, waggling his eyebrows.

Special sure was one way to put it.

Mario stared down at the generic white hotel mug in his hand. Two episodes of Superstore in, the coffee was undoubtedly veering towards lukewarm at best.

"Closure is for grief."

"There's grief when you leave a team," Holtby said. "And the way you did it was sudden. No chance to say goodbye. Your brain doesn't get to process it right."

"So I just have to say goodbye and everything will feel normal?"

Maybe he sounded a little snarky, but it seemed preposterous. Especially when the Sharks hadn't bothered to contact Mario once since he'd been caught. He'd sent just one text, to Burnzie, asking him to let the team know how sorry he was.

There hadn't been a reply.

He was pretty sure that was all the goodbye he was going to get.

Holtby hummed and leaned back against his headboard.

"If only it were that easy. The problem with closure is that it doesn't exist."

"But you just said that I need closure."

"Mhmm. Plenty of people do. But it doesn't exist. We always think there's going to be just one thing we have to do or say or have happen and then we can make ourselves move on. But that one thing doesn't exist. Closure isn't real. You might get that one thing you were waiting on, but it won't make you feel better."

Sometimes it was nice to have one person on the team who consistently spoke to him, even if he did it because he felt like he had to, but sometimes that one person could be really fucking frustrating.

"Then what the hell am I supposed to do?"

Holtby's smile wasn't a smirk, but Mario wished it was. It would have been a lot easier to hate that way.

"You keep living, every day, and eventually your brain will start to adjust. But until then you just have to keep going through the motions until it works."

Mario squinted at him. "Did you just tell me to fucking fake it till I make it?"

Now Holtby's smile was indeed a smirk.

"Hey, you've already made it, kid. You're the only one who hasn't figured it out yet."

The words stuck with Mario long after his coffee turned cold and he wandered off to his own room. They bounced around his head for weeks, as he played games as a Washington Capital and went home for Christmas so everyone could ask him about playing games as a Washington Capital and then went back to D.C. to play more games as a Washington Capital.

He knew he was the problem. His own attitude was the only reason he wasn't enjoying himself. His teammates hadn't given any sign that they disliked him or didn't want him around. Mario tried not to get in the middle of their pregame routines, mostly because he thought he might get checked through a wall, but Ovechkin made sure to fist bump him every game on his way to screaming something unintelligible at one of the other guys, and Carlson had somehow decided that kissing Mario's helmet was good luck (a routine that a few of the other guys had started picking up on, too).

Holtby went out of his way to include Mario, and apparently they were maybe friends now, though it still didn't make a bit of sense. Ovechkin had patted him on the head one day and told him, "you good at taking care of goalies," like it was something special that Mario and Holtby often sat next to each other in silence on the bus, or Mario held the door open for Samsonov one time.

The guys even joked that because Eller had accidentally caught Mario, he was Mario's assigned "dad" now, and there was great debate over what Eller should be titled because apparently calling your teammates your father was as big a thing on the Caps as calling them babe.

Mario kept his mouth shut, but it wasn't like they didn't include him anyway. It was just that, as always, they didn't need him to talk to include him.

The team was even doing well. There was no reason for him not to be happy, not when all reports were that the Sharks were a freefalling ball of fire and long-term injuries.

"Do you feel relieved to have been caught by a team that's playoff bound, knowing how much the Sharks are struggling this season?" a reporter asked him.

"I'm enjoying my time as a Cap," Mario replied, and his lip bled and bled and bled.

It ate him up inside sometimes, how angry he was with himself for the fact that he _wasn't_ enjoying himself. There was no reason not to; he was set to play his whole rookie year in the NHL, which boded well for maybe not ever having to be sent down, and he was playing for a team that was a shoe-in for the playoffs. It was his childhood dream.

If his dreams had shifted in the past few years since he was drafted to include the Sharks, then that was on him.

"What if my brain doesn't ever adjust?" he asked Holtby as they walked to the bus one day after practice in Florida. "What if I keep going through the motions and I'm faking it and I never make it?"

Holtby had taken a moment to mull it over, not replying until they'd been on the bus for a few minutes.

"It's kind of like surviving versus thriving," he finally said. "You'll get by, but you won't be happy about it."

Mario's nails were biting into his palms as he watched the grey buildings slide by, outlined by flashes of golden sunlight and palm trees.

"How do I make myself be happy about it?"

He didn't expect Holtby's hand to land on his own, nor for Holtby to calmly and casually unfold his hand and force him to spread his fingers. Holtby smoothed his thumb over the red indents on his palm as if it was a normal thing to do.

"That's the crux of the matter, isn't it? You can't make yourself be happy; it's going to happen, or it's not."

Mario's fingers flexed, but Holtby kept up the steady pressure, forcing his hand to remain flat.

"But what if I'm the reason I'm not happy? What if I'm doing it to myself?"

Holtby raised an eyebrow, but he didn't actually look surprised. "Why would you do that?"

Mario shrugged, looking down at their hands on the armrest. It was his hand that was spread wide, but he felt more like it was his guts laid bare, all the dented and dirty parts of his psyche pulled out for inspection.

"Because I'm mad," he said quietly, voice just barely higher than a whisper. "At myself, for getting caught. For being stuck on it months later and not getting over it. At the Sharks, for not teaching me better. For not talking to me after. For not caring enough. Maybe for not caring at all. And..."

He watched Holtby's thumb circling his palm, steady and firm, and wished he could be half as cool and collected as his teammates all seemed to think he was.

"And I'm mad at myself for caring about the fact that they don't care."

To his credit, Holtby didn't look surprised. But at this point, Mario had known him about as long as he'd known any of the Sharks, and he knew him well enough to know that Holtby rarely ever looked truly surprised.

"That's a lot to be mad about," Holtby said. "A lot of anger you're carrying around with you."

"I don't know how to stop," Mario whispered.

Holtby laced their fingers together and squeezed briefly, just once. "You've gotta put some of it down. Or it'll drag you down with it."

He took his hand back, but offered Mario one of his earbuds immediately after. Mario shook his head, looking back at the window. The morning was still stupidly bright in Florida, and reminded him miserably of California. It didn't seem fair for two places to be so far away and look so similar.

He wasn't sure if it would have been more or less painful to play in Florida instead of D.C.

January tipped into February, and the Caps took a few rough losses along with it. The team was looking shakier than they'd like this late into the season, and while they still had a healthy playoff berth, the east was far more competitive than the west, and they'd want to make some changes if they wanted to remain competitors.

Mario's name started coming up in trade talks again. The team kept saying they'd like to see him remain a Cap, of course, but every armchair GM thought he'd be good as part of a package deal. He was an accidental acquisition, after all; may as well spin him for a playoff rental.

At this point, Mario didn't know if things would be better or worse, with a new team. He may have been going through the motions, but the Caps liked him well enough. He had a routine with them now, even if it still didn't feel like his own.

If he got traded, he was pretty sure they'd still talk to him, at least.

A new team was an unknown quantity. It could be a hell of a lot worse, or maybe it would be the fresh start he needed to finally get over the specter of the Sharks and move on.

But it was all out of Mario's control, just like everything had been since he'd left San Jose. Even things that were nominally in control were not.

If he couldn't control his own fucking emotions, how could he expect to control anything else?

So he ignored the trade talk and gave a glazed smile to the reporters who asked him about it, because at the end of the day it was out of his control and he may as well not bother himself much with it.

He still lived mostly out of his suitcases, even when at home in D.C. If he got moved again, he wanted to be prepared this time.

But as the trade deadline crept up, something strange and thrilling and unexpected and absolutely fucking horrifying happened:

Mario didn't get traded.

Brenden Dillon did.

~~~

Brenden Dillon was traded to the Caps, for San Jose's "stated asking price" of a second and third round pick in the upcoming draft.

Dilly, one of the fan favorites, traded for some picks and a bag of pucks.

Apparently nothing was sacred when your team was having a fire sale, Mario supposed.

That should have been enough to get him to forget about the Sharks and move on, if they could drop one of their stars like that.

But instead it just made his chest feel tight and his stomach twist into knots because for the first time, he'd have to face someone from the team he'd left behind. From the team who hadn't deigned to speak to him from the moment he'd been dragged onto the Capitals' bench.

For once it was a good thing that Mario had a newfound reputation for not talking a lot, because it helped him get out of most questions about what Dilly was like with nothing but a shrug and a smile.

"He's a good guy," he said when Carlson asked. "Everyone loves him, he'll be great here."

That was true, at least. Mario imagined that leaving San Jose would be hard on Dilly, given the good history he had there, and he had more right to be cut up about it than Mario did. But Dilly was also a team-player, and Mario was sure that he'd get along well with the Caps pretty much instantly. He was just that type of guy.

"Must be exciting to have a friend coming from the Sharks," Holtby said to him during a break in drills at practice the day after the trade. Dilly was due to join them in practice, but so far he'd been tied up with the front office and nobody had seen him yet.

Mario glanced sideways at Holtby; Holtby certainly didn't look like he believed his own words, from the way he was intently watching for Mario's response.

After a moment of deliberation, Mario gave another shrug. "We weren't super close," he said quietly. "I wasn't there that long."

He'd thought that he was at least buddies with a few of the guys on the Sharks – the d-men, the young guys, and he'd always tried to be good to his goalies – but the radio silence was proof enough. It made sense: playing with a team for two months, a close-knit group who had for the most part been there for years, through deep playoff runs and hard losses – there was no reason for them to get attached to him that quickly. He was barely a flash in the pan.

But he didn't like the way Holtby continued scrutinizing him. Perhaps the one good thing about hanging around Samsonov instead of Holtby – aside from the fact that Samsonov's English wasn't fantastic and so he grilled Mario far less – was that Samsonov definitely had not yet had time to develop the strange goalie tactic of picking somebody's brain apart with their eyes.

Mario was tempted to ask Holtby what he wanted, to get the staring to stop, but then Coach whistled for their attention and Mario was desperately relieved to skate over and listen to him instead of being forced to admit that he was mildly terrified that their new acquisition was going to tell everyone he was weak for being caught.

The press all came out to watch the latter half of practice, signaling Dilly's arrival. It was particularly bizarre to see him in a red Caps practice jersey, but Dilly still managed to look right at home. Guys skated over in a crowd to welcome him and he received it all like a king returning to his court. One would have thought he'd been a Cap for years.

He fit in perfectly on his last team; of course he'd fit in better than Mario within seconds on his new team too.

Mario kept his distance, letting himself get lost in the shuffle. With all the movement, nobody would notice that he hadn't gone over to Dilly. All he had to do was get through this practice, and shower and drive back to his hotel and then he could sit on the edge of his bed and stare at the wall for half an hour until he started to feel human again.

By tomorrow he'd have his shit together, and he'd be able to put a good smile on for the guys, and he could get through their game against the Habs without feeling like he was going to throw up from anxiety.

"Dillon, you're with Ferraro!"

...Until the coach paired him up with Dilly, and the anxiety decided that he didn't really need to breathe that much anyway.

Dilly was smiling as he came over, beaming like they were old friends, and Mario was tempted to check behind him to see that there wasn't like, maybe a former teammate of Dilly's from the Stars behind him or something. But then Dilly slammed into him, pulling him into a hug while also shoving him back a few feet with his momentum.

"My baby Shark!" Dilly shook Mario a little, like he couldn't contain his enthusiasm, and Mario tried not to swallow his tongue. "Hey, how've you been?"

For a moment, Mario couldn't speak, or remember how language worked in general. All he could do was stare up at Dilly's big, friendly smile while his brain tried and failed to process this series of events.

And then it all started to come together, and Mario was able to force his shoulders to drop and his face to form something in the approximation of a smile.

Dilly was a professional hockey player who had just moved to a new team. He was going to be mature and polite and not bring up issues and old biases from his previous team, and give Mario a chance at a new start. At the very least, they had to play together, and Dilly was going to make sure they didn't have any problems with each other.

Really, it had been dumb of Mario to assume there would be.

"I'm fine," Mario said. "Uh, hey, how was your trip?"

He wasn't sure he liked how Dilly paused before he answered, mouth open and eyes narrowing like he thought something was wrong but couldn't determine just what it was. But a moment later Dilly was off on a story about what a pain it was to have to throw together bags and get on a late-night flight to D.C., and that filled the time until the next exercise started, and Mario could start to breathe normally again.

Dilly kept up a dialogue like that through the rest of practice, interspersed with calling chirps at his new teammates like he'd known them for years and not twenty minutes. Guys were already shoving playfully at him and chirping him back.

He really did fit in well.

But like clockwork Dilly would circle back to Mario whenever he had a chance, continuing his monologue with periodic pauses where he'd stare at Mario and prod him for a response. It felt like he was searching for something, trying to say the right word or poke in the right place to get Mario to admit to – something, he couldn't tell, but it made him feel hunted, scrambling for a response and another half-smile. It was the most he'd had to speak in a practice since joining the Caps, and he didn't feel used to it anymore.

He was doing this as the team trooped off the ice, trying to get Mario to talk about what his latest ideas were for his YouTube channel – none, because he hadn't put out a video in months – when Hathaway bumped his shoulder against Dilly's and said, "Dude, you gotta lay off Ferry. You've already used up his word allotment for the week, if you keep going he's gonna be all talked out for the month."

Dilly made a face, and Mario wasn't sure that he liked that face because he didn't know which part it was responding to. Granted, the nickname wasn't great and he really was not a fan, but he wasn't sure that's something that would bother Dilly.

"What do you mean? He talks all the time – have none of you ever heard him go off about like, literally anything Apple sells?"

A few guys laughed, but there was a bit of a weird silence after that. Mario kept his head down, hoping it would blow over if everybody would just let it go.

Except-

"I don't know what you're talking about, babe, but Ferry's a man of few words." Oshie came up behind Mario and smacked a kiss to his helmet.

"A man of _mystery_," Hathaway corrected, and the two of them looked thrilled enough with themselves that they'd probably be pretty thoroughly distracted for a while.

They hit the dressing room and Mario had never been so thrilled to take his clothes off in front of a team of other men, because it meant he was close to getting out of there.

"So usually you talk a lot more?"

Mario flinched and dropped his helmet; it landed with a clatter on the bench of his stall. Holtby was standing behind him, still in full practice gear, mask under one arm, staring at him intently.

"I talk a normal amount." Mario kept his words as measured as possible. "So, if you'll excuse me..."

He trailed off expectantly, but Holtby didn't leave right away. He kept staring, that same awful scrutinizing stare, until Ovechkin came up and hugged him from behind.

"Don't stare when people change, Holts, you gonna make him shy." He winked at Mario over Holtby's shoulder as he prodded Holtby away, and Mario really didn't know how to feel about Alexander Ovechkin maybe actually owning a sense of social awareness, and so he decided not to think about it.

Everyone blessedly left Mario alone as he finished stripping and went to the showers, and he had almost tricked himself into thinking that he'd be able to get out of this cleanly – the edge of his bed and the wall across from it awaited his blank stare – when Dilly stepped into his path as he was going for the exit, slinging an arm around Mario's shoulders.

"Hey bud. Take me out to lunch, I need someone to show me all the good spots. One former Shark to another?"

Dilly's smile was still just as friendly as before, his hair still damp and curling around the edges. He hadn't even bothered to dry it properly to put any product in it, and Mario briefly wondered if he'd foregone that just to chase after Mario and beg him for lunch.

But the whole idea didn't really make sense, and Mario dismissed it out of hand.

"Uh..."

Truth be told, he couldn't claim that he didn't know where to get lunch, because most of Mario's diet in the past two, nearly three months had been take-out and restaurants. He went for lunch often enough with some of the other guys, usually one of the goalies or the younger guys. Oshie took a particular fascination in taking Mario to "all the best places" and ordering for him, only to then watch him with far too much anticipation as he tried that week's latest "BEST sandwich in D.C." and gave it his approval.

So, Mario actually did have a pretty good handle on where to get lunch.

He just didn't want to.

As if sensing his hesitation and not giving one shit about it, Dilly squeezed him a little closer and said, "Braden recommended you take me to that place Sammy showed you last week."

One fucking hour in and he was already trading gossip with the starting goalie about Mario. Both goalies, if Samsonov had been talking about where they'd gone. And of course he had no problem using Holtby's first name, when Mario could barely get himself to say Holtby's last name out loud and usually tried to avoid using his name altogether.

He wondered what Dilly had asked about him. What Holtby had said, that he'd so clearly wanted to circumvent Mario's delay tactics and toss him directly under the teal-colored bus. Dilly was being nice to his face, but maybe this was tied up with everything, with Mario having been caught and Dilly wanting to let the team's leadership know what they really thought about him, that they couldn't trust him, that he was weak, that he wasn't worth their time because he'd just get caught again-

"I have plans," Mario told Dilly's shoulder.

"Doing what?"

Mario was sure he was being deliberately obtuse, he absolutely had to know what he was doing, but knowing that didn't give him a better way to turn Dilly away.

"C'mon, man," Dilly said quietly, when Mario took far too long to come up with a believable response. "Just so we can talk?"

Talking was the last thing that Mario wanted to do, but it didn't seem like he was going to be able to get away without it.

"Talking would have been nice three months ago," Mario muttered. He shouldered Dilly's arm off of him. "Come on, we can take my car."

"Hey, what?" Dilly had to jog a little to keep up with him, which Mario was perversely pleased about. When Mario didn't immediately answer, Dilly grabbed his arm, tugging with enough pressure to make Mario's shoulder protest. "Dude, hold on, what are you talking about?"

He looked like he didn't know, like he was maybe a little hurt, which was fucking rich seeing as it wasn't like he'd tried once to reach out since Mario was caught. None of them had.

"Don't play at this," Mario said quietly, _tiredly_, directing his gaze next to Dilly's ear. "Look, we're gonna play together, but we don't have to be like – you don't have to pretend we're friends, just because the guys expect we should be. I already told Holtby that we weren't super close, they're not gonna expect too much anyways."

Mario tried to tug his arm back, but Dilly refused to let go.

"Not close – I mean, maybe we're not like, best friends, but we hung out! We're a team!"

The way he used the present tense made Mario's stomach squirm uncomfortably, even if he supposed it was technically true again now.

"Now we are. But we weren't – I haven't been a Shark for a while now, for longer than I actually _was_ a Shark, and any friendships I had on that team have been gone since I was caught, so it really doesn't matter that much anyways. We can be teammates, if we have to. But being team doesn't mean you're obligated to be my friend."

He forced another smile, the ones that he did for the media, for team events. He liked to think he was getting better at them, but Dilly's dismayed expression did nothing for his confidence.

"You can't think – dude, you definitely have friends on the Sharks. Like, w- they miss you a lot."

Now it was Mario's turn to frown, the brittle smile sliding right off his face.

"Uh...none of you talk to me. _Them_," he corrected. "And maybe some of that's on me, because I didn't try to reach out."

He really fucking doubted that was why none of them wanted to talk to him.

"But I tried texting Burnzie to tell the guys I was sorry, and I never heard from him or anyone else, so I could like, take a hint. I'm an adult. I know I wasn't really on the team that long anyway and that nobody would be that cut up about me leaving. It's fine."

It kind of wasn't, but it was bad enough that his starting goaltender knew about it; like hell was he going to tell Dilly.

Dilly, who looked like Mario had just told him that there was a global shortage on hair gel.

"Dude, that is so fantastically untrue, oh my God. They're like-"

He cut himself off, grimacing and stepping away. He finally released Mario's arm, at least, so that he could cross his arms tightly across his chest. Mario watched how it stretched his shirt across his pecs so that he didn't have to stare at his face.

"Seriously," Dilly said. "Trust me. I can't really- I can't get into all of it, but they miss you. A lot. You have a lot of friends there."

Mario was suddenly struck with the feeling of being a child in elementary school, with an awkward adult insisting to them that the other kids really did want to be his friend, that was the reason that nobody would play with him on the playground or come to his birthday party. It felt about just as believable, looking back at how lonely and disorienting the past few months had felt, to have someone come in and try to insist that all the people who refused to speak to him really cared about him.

_Missed _him.

"Stop it," Mario hissed, meeting Dilly's gaze in a glare. "Don't keep- stop saying that. You're being a dick."

It was easier than admitting what he really thought, that it was cruel, to keep lying to him like that. Saying that really would make him feel like that bullied kid in grade school.

Dilly had no right to look that hurt, that distraught. Not over this.

"Mar," he said quietly, with far too much emotion, "Why do you think they like – that we all _hate_ you or something?"

"Because I got caught!" Mario exploded. He immediately looked around the parking lot for any possible witnesses to his outburst, but couldn't spot any. Lower, he said, "Because I was stupid enough to get myself caught when the team needed me, and me getting caught just made everything worse in an already shitty season, and the team didn't even get anything in exchange for me. Though it's not really fucking fair for everyone to take it out on me, seeing as nobody ever fucking trained me how _not_ to get caught like they did for Timo or Gamby or like, fuck, literally all of the forwards."

He ran out of steam and out of words, standing there with his fists clenched, staring Dilly down, making more fucking eye contact than he'd made in three months. The words were out there in the world now, everything he'd been holding inside drained out and shoved at one of the people who was actually involved in what had happened, instead of just an unimpassioned goaltender on another team.

He'd always thought he'd feel better, after getting it off his chest. That's what everyone said was supposed to happen. You vent, you get closure, you slam the cover on that book and you move on.

_Closure isn't real. You might get that one thing you were waiting on, but it won't make you feel better._

Well, he sure as fuck didn't feel any better. Dilly's big, sad eyes just made the knot in his gut worse.

"Mario," he said lowly, miserably, "I swear to you that is not true. Nobody- nobody blames you for what happened. At all. They do blame themselves, for not watching better, for not teaching you – I swear, nobody there hates you."

He was a good actor, had to be, to look so unhappy, to sound so heartbroken.

But Mario shook his head. "It doesn't matter. Say what you want. Nobody's tried to talk to me in three months. I can put the pieces together myself."

When he turned and stalked off to his car, Dilly didn't try to follow.

Mario did get to sit on the side of his bed and stare at the wall. It didn't make him feel better, but he hadn't expected that it would.

He just had to make it through the next few days. That's what he told himself, over and over. Dilly kept making big, sad cow-eyes at him across the dressing room, but he didn't keep forcing his presence on Mario anymore. All Mario had to do was tolerate being in the same general space as him for the next few days, and by the deadline on Monday he'd be traded and none of this would be his problem anymore.

That was all the media wanted to talk about, how with Dilly on the team, the Caps really didn't need so many extra defensemen. They'd still never truly expected Mario to stay, and now they were sure he'd be moved at the last minute, at the very least for picks if not as part of a bigger deal.

"What did you say to Dilly?" Holtby asked on the plane to Jersey.

"It doesn't matter," Mario said, putting his headphones on and effectively ending any attempts at conversation. Maybe it was rude, but it didn't matter that much either.

He'd be gone soon.

On the day before the trade deadline, the Caps gave up a third-round pick for Ilya Kovalchuk, and the media said this made sense, when they'd trade Mario to get that pick back in return.

And the trade deadline came, and the Caps...

...didn't trade Mario.

He felt dumbfounded when he hung up the call from his agent, telling him that he definitively had not been moved last-minute before the deadline. He was going to be a Cap through the end of the season, would almost certainly be getting his first taste of the playoffs.

Well. Unless.

"Just so you know, the Bruins are headhunting again," his agent said, before they disconnected the call. "They've got a _lot_ of open cap space."

"Do we play them soon?" Mario asked.

"Day after the Sharks game. So, if you aren't happy with the Caps, may want to make yourself available near some benches. Not that I'm recommending that, of course."

Of course, because he couldn't professionally recommend that Mario try to encourage or fake a catch, assuming the Bruins even wanted him.

Players couldn't be traded after the deadline, and players signed after the deadline couldn't participate in the playoffs. But there were no such restrictions on catching players after the deadline. And it was a pretty clear indication that if a team had a lot of free cap space coming out of the deadline, they were most likely looking to fill up that space by catching a few new contracts.

A few teams tried their luck at headhunting in the last few weeks of the season, but none were as infamously successful as the Bruins. Chara had an all-time league record for most completed catches; Mario assumed it was just because he had a ridiculously long reach.

So, there was still a chance that Mario wouldn't be ending his season as a Cap. He didn't think he'd go out of his way to get caught – he wasn't particularly looking to become a Bruin, though at this point it couldn't be that different from being a Cap, and they were both going to the playoffs – but if the first catch taught him anything, it was that sometimes he wasn't in control of those sorts of things.

But to get to the Bruins game, he first had to make it through San Jose's visit to D.C. Something that he'd been sadly unable to forget was coming up.

The Sharks were coming to town in just a few days. It was just another game, like dozens of others he'd played in a Caps uniform. Whatever the thing with Dilly had been, a twisted effort at making a peace offering or an outright attempt to blot out the past, that didn't mean anything had changed with the rest of the Sharks. Unlike Dilly, none of them were being forced to play on the same team as Mario (and sometimes in the same pairing), and they had no reason to talk to him at all.

They were just another team. It was just another game. That's what he told himself, over and over again.

"Why do you look like you're gonna puke?" Carlson asked Mario at morning skate the day of the Sharks game.

Apparently he wasn't doing such a good job of treating it as just another game.

"It's gonna be fine," Dilly said quietly when they were out on the ice for skate, tapping the backs of Mario's calves with his stick. "They're not gonna like, come after you or something. They're excited to see you, I promise."

That was easy for the guy who'd gone out to dinner with the Sharks last night to say.

Mario grimaced and skated off.

Just another game.

"Hey, if anyone tries to fuck you up tonight, we got your back, man," Wilson said, clapping Mario on the shoulder with a smile as he stepped off the ice.

He notably did not seem to think anyone was going to try to fuck up Dilly.

Just another game. Right.

Mario couldn't sleep before the game, could barely eat without feeling just as nauseous as Carlson had said he looked. He just laid in his hotel bed, staring at the white, nondescript ceiling, wondering if he'd even still be here come tomorrow night or if he'd be packing his shit to get on a plane with yet another new team.

If he didn't get the shit kicked out of him tonight, which he hadn't actually feared until everyone started bringing it up.

The most damning thing, he'd thought, would have been for them to ignore him, and ignoring him was what he'd actually expected them to do. He hadn't expected them to be openly malicious, but everyone else was acting like they knew something he didn't.

It would be hard, but tolerable, for his old team to pretend he didn't exist. He could deal with that. He could treat them as just another team, too.

If they were actually targeting him, taking shots at him or trying to say things to get under his skin...yeah, he probably wouldn't take that so well. And they'd see it, and they'd dig in more, and he'd be a fucking mess out there on the ice, and then _everybody_ would see it and absolutely nobody would want him.

He didn't realize he'd been holding his breath until his lungs began to burn. Apparently he couldn't even do breathing right anymore.

His pregame routine was a familiar blur, the same sets of exercises and stretches and putting on gear that he'd done for years, since college, since juniors. It was everything that came next that made him nervous.

"Same as any other game," Holtby said, patting him on the ass with the paddle of his stick and nudging him toward the ice.

And...it was.

For all of warm-ups, nobody from the Sharks approached him or paid him any mind. They didn't look his way once, let alone make rude comments. Maybe they were saving it for the game, but Mario kind of doubted it.

All of that anxiety, for nothing. It was just what he'd expected initially: he didn't mean that much to the Sharks in the first place, so they weren't going to acknowledge him at all. It had been so long since he was caught, they probably weren't really even thinking about the fact that he was playing against them now.

Truthfully, he couldn't have asked for a better outcome, than to be ignored. A clean break. Let him cut the cord and move on.

Maybe after this game, he could.

The first period was...normal. Mario blocked a shot from Jumbo with his shin and was sure he'd be feeling that bruise for a while. He checked Eddie into the boards to steal the puck off of him. Nobody was yelling at him, or calling him names, or even really making an attempt to chirp him. Maybe it was weird, that they acted like they didn't know him, but it could have been a lot worse. That's what he told himself, over and over.

It could be worse.

The game trucked on just like that, with Backstrom scoring in the first and Melker tying it minutes later. Early in the second period Marcus took a hooking penalty and Vrana scored on the resulting power play, and that seemed to open the floodgates, because both Kovalchuk and Kuznetsov scored after that. Mario got checked by Simmer, but it wasn't any rougher or dirtier than any normal check.

The Caps were sitting on a 4-1 lead going into the third period, and feeling pretty damn pleased with themselves.

"Gonna make them regret letting you go, babe?" Oshie bounced his shoulder off of Mario's, his smile infectious enough that Mario had to at least try to smile back.

"Yeah..." He didn't feel the thrill guys talked about, beating an old team, but it was still nice to get a win, and he wasn't making a fool of himself all over the ice, either. He actually had an assist on the fourth goal, and his stats were probably looking pretty commendable right now. Really, he couldn't have imagined a better game.

The Sharks scored just two minutes into the third, Timo sniping it right off the faceoff and straight past Holtby. That seemed to motivate the Sharks a bit more, because they were definitely livelier as the third period drove on, more energy to their hits, more speed as they moved the puck up the ice. It was like a different team was playing than the one that had fallen asleep in the second.

But the Sharks were still down by two with seven minutes left in the game, and that was when they decided to pull the goalie. It was ridiculously early, something straight out of the Patrick Roy coaching playbook and not what Mario would have pegged for Boughner as a head coach, but then, he'd only known Boughner when DeBoer was still in charge. Maybe taking risks like that was his style.

Regardless, it was the perfect chance for the Caps to go on the attack, and when Kempny got the puck and passed it out of their defensive zone to neutral ice, Mario was the one to chase it so that he could take it towards the empty net. Jonesy was about halfway to the benches, set between Mario and the goal, still close enough to his net that he could scramble back to defend it now that he saw that the Caps had possession of the puck.

Mario looked across the ice, passing the puck to Eller because he'd have a clearer shot on net from that angle, and so Mario wasn't looking when he slammed into the wall.

Or, not the wall.

Jonesy.

The opposing goaltender, Martin Jones, a veritable stanchion in teal, was nowhere near his net and had in fact not been returning to defend his goal while Mario was passing the puck to Eller.

No, as Mario would see in the replay later, San Jose's goal was being defended by Noes diving in front of it like a breaching whale, and Martin Jones did not make one single attempt to return to his net, because he was too busy barreling into Mario like a bullet train. The hit had enough force to it that Mario by all rights should have gone flying, should have had whiplash from his neck snapping back, but none of that happened because when Jonesy hit him, he grabbed Mario up in some sort of goalie bear hug, clasping his blocker around Mario's waist and using his glove to press Mario's face into his jersey, keeping it from jerking with the hit.

Mario was momentarily stunned, and suffocated, clasped in the hot, sweaty, dark confines between Jonesy's glove and his chest, but he could feel his feet nearly being swept out from under him, skates slipping and sliding as he was held just slightly off the ice, enough so that he couldn't catch his balance.

He kicked out and squirmed, but he couldn't get much traction against Jonesy's pads, and then he was hoisted sideways and he was fucking airborne, landing hard on his side against the boards and knowing immediately that it would be bruised for weeks. Hands grabbed at him from every angle, yanking and pulling and only coming to a stop when Mario was lying across the laps of the San Jose Sharks with Brent Burns's toothless grin gaping down at him.

"That was one hell of a long shift you took, kid. Took you three months to get back to the bench, eh?"

Mario blinked up at him, because he didn't know what else to do. He tried to sit up and there were immediately a plethora of hands on him, helping him up, but they didn't let him off of Burnzie's lap, Burnzie's hands clasped firmly around his middle. When Mario looked out at the ice, Eller and Hagelin were up in Jonesy's face and Kells was taking exception to it, pushing Jonesy behind him as Davidson, who Mario didn't know, was shoving at Kempny.

He could hear the shouts coming from the Washington bench, Ovechkin and Oshie and Wilson loud and making their displeasure widely known. But what was more distracting was Boughner stalking along behind the bench and shoving his head between Burnzie and Jumbo and hissing, "What the _fuck_ did you guys do?"

Oh. So Mario should take it that he definitely hadn't been on San Jose's catch board either.

Jumbo smiled like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. "We had to get our baby Shark back."

Boughner was not nearly so enchanted. "Well I have to fucking deal with this and I can't tell everyone that I had no fucking clue what my team was planning. Who was in on this? Cooch? Tommy, Erik? Dilly?" He paused, and then snapped his head to look at the rest of the bench.

"What, fucking all of you?" When nobody said anything, he dragged a hand down his face. "Fuck it, fine, I'll deal with you later. I have to go figure out if goalies can be catchers."

"There's nothing in NHL's rules restricting goalies being catchers." Nabby's voice was serene and his face was a picture of calm as he stood in the arena of jeering fans, looking for all the world like he was on a beach back in California. When Boughner stared at him, he smiled. "I checked. It's like having goalie for a captain. Not traditional, but not illegal."

Boughner looked to be rapidly losing his cool. "You too? Jesus fucking Christ, did everyone know about this other than me?"

The equipment staff wisely kept their mouths shut.

But Boughner gamely went to talk to the refs and argue for why this catch, that he had most definitely orchestrated _with_ his team because he had definitely _not_ just a minute ago been screaming at Jonesy to _go back to your fucking net what the fuck are you doing_, was perfectly legal and its unconventionality did not mean that it could not be done, no matter what Washington wanted to argue.

And argue they did, because Reirden was standing on the bench, face red as he yelled at Boughner and the officials and whoever he could get to, and Ovechkin was right there with him. Mario was actually a little surprised that they would have that type of reaction to losing him, but then, maybe it was just the perceived unfairness of it all that they were responding to.

The officials were on the line with Toronto, and Mario jumped when Burnzie squeezed him tighter.

"Just a few more minutes and we can get you out of here," he said.

Mario squinted at him, face uncomprehending. "But..._why_?"

Jumbo snorted loudly next to him. "Why, what? The Caps took our rookie; we took our rookie back. Fair's fair."

"But like...why me? You don't..."

"Kid," Jumbo interrupted, "We have been practicing that play since the day after you got caught. With both goalies, because we didn't know who was gonna be in net tonight. Dilly told us you've got some sort of bullshit in your head about us, and I don't know what it is, but we've been planning to steal you back since the moment they took you."

It didn't sound possible in the way that the plot of a B-rate action film didn't sound possible, like it only made sense in the most fantastical of worlds where real life wasn't a factor.

Mario had told himself that being ignored was his best-case scenario, but the true pipe dream impossible fantasy would be for the Sharks to have been putting together a secret plan for months to steal him back because they really liked him that much.

It was a movie plot. It wasn't real life.

But here he was, sitting on the San Jose bench in Brent Burns's lap, listening to Burnzie say, "I'm so sorry I never called you after the game, but we couldn't let you think we were stealing you back or you wouldn't have fought it enough to make it believable."

"They're already taking way too long reviewing it," Timo said darkly, startling Mario, who hadn't realized he was on Jumbo's other side.

"It'll be fine, we checked over and over, there are no rules against it," Deller said from his chair at the end of the bench. He smiled and waved when he saw Mario looking at him. "Hey, Mar! I'm a little jealous I didn't get to try to catch you, but Gamby and Gregs are probably happy we don't have to haul them around for practice anymore."

"Haul them around...?" Mario muttered, and then he shook his head. It didn't make sense, none of this made sense. "I just can't believe, you guys seriously..."

"Wanted our rookie back," Jumbo repeated. "Trust me, more planning went into this than went into...probably most things the league plans, actually. I don't know what to tell you, kid. You're stuck with us. Sharks for life, all that shit."

"Bleeding teal," Bancer added helpfully.

"That's right, you're gonna be bleeding teal for a fucking long time, kid."

The official was coming back to center ice, and Mario really did stop breathing in that moment, waiting on the call.

"We have a good catch!"

The referee's following explanation that there was nothing in the official NHL rulebook against a goalie making a catch was drowned out by Washington's boos.

And Mario was drowned in helmet pats and overwhelming bear hugs from everyone on the Sharks bench, because it was a good catch, and he was officially a Shark again.

It didn't feel real. The walk to the visitors' dressing room didn't feel real, nor did changing out of his Caps gear and taking a shower and putting on what was definitely some of Jumbo's workout gear "because he's not going to use his shirt anyway so you might as well."

One of the equipment guys offered to run over to the Caps' dressing room to get his things, but Mario shook his head. "I'll do it," he said. "I need to...I want to say goodbye this time."

Closure wasn't real, perhaps, but Mario needed to bookend this. He needed to make it final.

The Caps were trickling back into the dressing room when Mario was grabbing his things. The environment was significantly subdued for a team that had just won the game (because Noes's breaching whale save had miraculously worked, but the Sharks hadn't managed to come back from that 4-2 deficit).

He stood there awkwardly for a moment, expecting their derision, their blame, because he'd let himself be stolen _again_, but instead-

Oshie was the first to hug him, and then Hathaway, and Siegenthaler, and then he was being passed around the room for hugs and head pats and well-wishes.

"I'm sorry we couldn't keep you," Ovechkin said, more solemn than Mario could ever remember seeing him.

"Next time I steal you, it'll be on purpose," Eller said with a wink and a punch to his shoulder.

It was Backstrom who watched him with narrowed eyes. "You're not actually quiet, are you?"

Mario did what he did best, and smiled and shrugged. "Depends who you ask, I guess."

Backstrom shook his head in disgust. "That's already too much talking from you. Go away, we don't need another loudmouth in here." But his hand was friendly as he shoved Mario along to the next stall.

When Mario got to Dilly, he was clearly trying not to smile too hard, the happiest Capital in the room.

"You knew," Mario said, blinking up at him. "This whole time, you knew what they were going to do."

"Of course I did, I helped plan it." Dilly looked far too pleased with himself. "That's what I was trying to tell you, we were practicing that every day after practice for _months_. They were terrified of getting it wrong, and if everyone was still friendly with you, like chatting before the game and everything, it wouldn't have been a believable catch and Toronto might have shut it down."

Here he grimaced. "Trust me, nobody ever hated you. But I might have broken their hearts a little bit when I told them that's what you'd thought."

"I was on the team for two months," Mario pointed out.

Dilly snorted and shook his head. "And you were on this one for three months, look at how this team feels about you leaving. Even when you're miserable, you still turn out to be kind of loveable, man. You've got that effect on people. Use it to your advantage and go do great things in San Jose."

He gave Mario a quick hug and went to pass him on, but Mario stopped him with a hand on his arm.

"But why not you?" he asked in a hushed voice. "Why wouldn't they try to steal you too?"

Or instead.

Mario tried not to look too much like an unhappy cat when Dilly ruffled his curls. "Because my contract's up at the end of the year, kid. I can find my own way back."

And with a wink, he shoved Mario off to the next stall.

The last person Mario came to was Holtby. Unlike everyone else, he didn't greet Mario with a hug or a pat on the shoulder or a word of encouragement.

He sized him up, the same way he always did, taking his time with it. And then he asked, "How's the anger doing?"

"It's better," Mario said. "I put some of it down. And it's changing. I don't know...I'm still confused. I'm still wrapping my head around everything. But it's...I can live with this."

And then, because Holtby perhaps looked just the slightest bit sad, if he looked anything at all, Mario said, "I think I could have learned to be happy here, with time. Grief takes time, right? And I think I would have gotten there. It's just..."

He sighed. "I had a lot of things I was still working through. _Am_ still working through. But I just want to thank you. For trying, and for putting up with me, and for being there right from the start. You were..."

He didn't know quite what Holtby had been. Weird, a pain in the ass, a confidante, a mentor. Maybe a friend.

But Mario didn't have to find the right word, because Holtby smiled, a real smile, and he dragged Mario in for a warm, firm hug.

"You just watch your back next year," he said against Mario's ear. "If goalies are making catches now, maybe I'll be doing a bit of headhunting of my own."

He helped Mario pull together the rest of his things, and then Mario was back down the hall to the San Jose dressing room. He walked in carrying a bundle of sticks and a bag of gear and a pile of his belongings and he was hailed like a returning hero, immediately buried under a pile of hockey players in various states of undress.

"There he is!"

"Took you long enough."

"Stop fucking hanging out with the enemy, kid, you're giving us anxiety."

It was Jumbo who hauled Mario from the scrum, making a show of straightening out his own oversized t-shirt that Mario was still wearing, as if that would cover for the fact that he was swimming in it.

"C'mon kid, get dressed. Tomorrow we're starting your lessons on how to keep your ass from getting caught because really, twice in one year? We're clearly falling down on the job. Can't have our baby Shark getting caught again."

The Sharks may have lost, in a season littered with injuries and no chance at the postseason, but the energy in the room was like they'd just made the playoffs. All because they'd caught Mario.

Mario, of all people.

As if seeing it on Mario's face, Jumbo said, "Yeah, yeah, don't let it go to your head, kid. You're gonna take the punishment from Coach right along with the rest of us."

"He said he's going to skin us alive," Bancer piped up cheerfully.

It was going to be a team-wide experience for the San Jose Sharks.

It sounded horrible.

Mario couldn't wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If it isn't clear, I didn't bother tagging for it but Mario is definitely an unreliable narrator who very much responds to his perception of events as opposed to what's actually happening (which is why he's so often surprised by how people then don't act the way he assumes they will).
> 
> This fic is complete and I'm marking it as such, but at some point I will be attaching a coda to it.
> 
> I'm [swedishgoaliemafia](https://swedishgoaliemafia.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr.


	2. Coda: Takesies Backsies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A look at what the Sharks were up to when they weren't talking to Mario during Catch and Release.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was supposed to write this a few days after I posted the fic and clearly that did not happen. I'm writing it now because it was all my brain wants to write, amongst the multiple WIPs I've been trying to work on for months.
> 
> As with all of my fics, this mostly turned into reflecting on how much the San Jose Sharks love each other.  
And flufflybunnypants and I have mutually agreed that Brent Burns would definitely think of himself solely as Burnzie, as would his teammates. (Imagine calling him Brent. It just doesn't compute.)
> 
> Unedited, we die like men, etc etc.

He didn't see it happen. Television analysts and armchair experts with overactive Twitter accounts would examine the footage for weeks, picking apart every split-second motion so they could best document all of the things that Mario Ferraro did wrong that allowed him to be caught, but they would fail to ever comment on the most egregious error of all: Brent Burns was Mario Ferraro's defensive partner on that shift, and he didn't see it happen.

Burnzie wasn't even looking when the Capitals dragged Mario over the boards and onto their bench.

It was everything that the press always gave him shit for, being out of position because he was too caught up in trying to play offense and not enough defense. In his worst moments in the months after the catch, Burnzie thought that if Eddie had been out on the ice instead of him, this would never have happened. Eddie was never out of position, and he would have seen Eller approaching Mario, would have easily intervened before anything happened.

But it was Burnzie out there with Mario, a veteran and his favorite rookie, and when the Caps dumped the puck out of their zone and Mario went out to retrieve it, Burnzie was way on the wrong side of the blue line, because he'd been up around the net helping with scoring chances instead of at the blue line like he was supposed to be.

And so he'd only just been skating towards the line with all of the forwards, looking to regain control of the puck and set up another scoring opportunity, when the crowd started shrieking chaotically and a commotion started near the benches. When Burnzie first looked over, he couldn't immediately pick out what was happening, because the Caps were crowding the boards, but they didn't seem to be trying to get the puck, and there was a flash of teal mixed in the red-

Teal, _behind_ the boards, because the Capitals had caught Mario and thrown him onto their own bench.

Burnzie quite honestly didn't fully recall the next few minutes as anything more than a blur of intoxicating anger and a heart-pounding, gut-wrenching internal mantra of _oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck_. But he'd seen the video enough times that he knew what it had looked like from an outsider's point of view.

Mario was pulled onto Washington's bench, and the Capitals all gathered around the bench talking about it. Moments later, Burnzie came tearing across the ice, roaring obscenities, and slamming into Eller in a move that got him a pleasant phone call with DOPS about charging unsuspecting opponents after play had been called dead. By that point the rest of the Sharks had taken notice of what had happened, and piled in to support Burnzie.

The Caps naturally took offense to that, both the players on the ice and the ones on the bench. Burnzie and Eller were buried in the ensuing melee. Bancer got off a fairly impressive punch to Dowd's face that never got penalized, and one of the cameramen focused far too closely on how both Timo and Hagelin fixed their hair mid-fight.

Burnzie had seen the video dozens of times, but the part that always stuck in his head was the look on Mario's face at just the moment where he realized where he was, that he'd been caught. That look of confusion twisting into horror – he saw it every time he closed his eyes, because it was his fault. Burnzie knew it as soon as he saw Mario on Washington's bench.

If he'd been in position, if he'd fucking watched the puck, if he'd made sure that _someone_ gave the kid a few pointers about keeping his distance from the benches...

If, if, if. Hindsight was a bitch and guilt was worse, but neither would bring Mario Ferraro back to the San Jose Sharks.

"He loves this team."

It was Jonesy who broke the tomb-like silence of their dressing room when the game ended – a pathetic 3-1 loss, because this season had already been rough but absolutely nobody's heart was in it after losing Mario.

Because that was it, wasn't it? He'd been here for only a few months, but everyone was already so attached to him. The kid was like bottled sunshine, too much brightness crammed into a small package, always eager to help and eager to learn and just _eager_. And he was earnest, too, painfully so, gushing to any reporter who would listen that he loved this team (this miserable, aging, _failing_ team) and that he wanted to be a Shark for the entirety of his career. It was a lofty goal for any player to spend their whole career on the same team, but Mario looked like he was going to make it happen through sheer willpower and smiles alone. And God, with an attitude like that, everyone was rooting for him. He'd been one of the few bright spots of an inauspicious start to the season, up there with getting Patty back in terms of morale-boosting.

And so when Jonesy broke the silence, voice detached and pensive, like he was making a general observation, everyone nodded along. They all knew how much Mario loved the Sharks. And they all knew how much they loved having him there.

When all of the critics had already forecasted your last-place finish, Mario made you want to at least try to be a team worthy of so much enthusiasm.

"They didn't even let him say goodbye," Goody muttered. That was perhaps one of the most egregious parts of the whole incident, that the team had trooped into the dressing room at the end of the first period and Mario's stall had already been cleared out. The dressing room attendant said that the Caps wanted Mario to pack up his apartment while the game was wrapping so that they could have him on the plane with the rest of the team after the game.

There was no goodbye. There was nothing. Mario went out for a normal shift in the first period and he never came back. There was just this hole where he used to be, this literal empty stall in the middle of the dressing room, stripped of all but his nameplate.

Christ, Burnzie couldn't remember the last thing he'd even said to Mario. It would have been on the bench, they were always talking on the bench – Mario was a quick study, always asking questions about plays, needling vets for tips and advice. Burnzie stayed late with him after practice all the time; the first time Mario was crunched into the boards because he didn't have his head up, Burnzie kept him for a full hour after the next practice, drilling him over and over on how to best receive a check so that he didn't get hurt.

Maybe, in all that advice, he could have slipped in a few tips on how not to get caught, and then they wouldn't be in this mess.

"He was caught," Erik pointed out. When he received a roomful of dark looks, he held his hands up. "Look, when I was with the Sens and the Rangers caught Mika Zibanejad, they let him say goodbye, but the Penguins took Derick Brassard and sent someone to empty his stall, just like the Caps did with Mario. Some teams...get weird about it."

"It's fucking evil, not letting him say goodbye," Eddie muttered.

"Okay." Logan called everyone's attention to him by standing up and moving to the front of the room, where Coach usually stood to speak to the team. "We're all upset about this, but sitting here complaining about it won't change anything."

"Should we complain about why nobody taught our fucking _rookie_ how not to get caught, then? All of the other rookies were taught, but not Mario. Why the fuck is that?" Timo cast Joe a venomous look, and it said something for how much Joe had to be beating himself up that he didn't even react to that accusation.

Mario was Burnzie's rookie, but it was Joe who had unofficially taken it upon himself to train all the rookies in how to avoid being caught during a game. Players on entry-level contracts were easy fodder for catching because they had cheap contracts that favored the team over the player, and they were highly portable for trades. Even low-drafted rookies were worth catching when you were getting them pretty much for free.

"It was an oversight," Joe mumbled, while at the same time Cooch barked, "Hey! Bitching at our team is _not_ going to bring Mario back either!"

And of course, Timo went for it, because he always did, eyes lit on Logan with renewed fury. "Well it's not like anything else is going to bring him back, so why the fuck not? Who else can we bitch at? Not the Caps, because they're long gone."

Cooch took a step closer, and at least four guys were halfway out of their seats – to defuse the situation or join in, Burnzie wasn't sure.

"What if we did bring him back to the team?" an accented voice cut across the bickering.

Burnzie had never played with Evgeni Nabokov. He'd played against him multiple times, but he'd only really met him when he came on as a goaltending coach for the Sharks. But he knew about the love that the city of San Jose had for Nabby, the way that guys like Jumbo and Patty and Pavs would always take his word as gospel. Nabby held a lot of respect in San Jose, in and out of the dressing room.

And so when Nabby leaned in the doorway, still lingering long after the rest of the coaching staff had taken their leave and left the boys to sort themselves out, everyone sat up and paid attention.

Cooch had played with Nabby in his rookie year, and between that and having been raised by Jumbo, he was usually more than willing to cede the floor to Nabby. But he was also a skeptical son of a bitch and trying to captain a failing team that was presently more miserable than usual, and so he scrutinized Nabby with narrowed eyes.

"And how do you propose we do that?"

If Nabby noticed Logan's distrust, he wasn't bothered by it.

"Easy," he said with a smile. "We catch him."

Maybe it was because Nabby was the one to propose it, and you were always supposed to listen to and trust in your goalies, even the retired ones. Maybe it was because they were hurting and licking their wounds and they wanted to lash out at the people who'd wronged them.

Maybe it was because they really, really loved Mario and wanted him back.

Whatever the reason, when Nabby outlined his plan that evening, he had the ear of the entire Sharks dressing room.

And the next morning after practice had ended and DeBoer and the rest of the coaches had left, they started drilling for a catch of their own.

"We use the goalies," Nabby had said that night when Mario was caught, diagramming it out on the white board on the wall that they used to map out plays. "A pulled goalie is expected to come to the bench, and so they can get in close. Nobody will expect it."

"Is that even legal?" Patty asked.

"Nothing in rules against it," Nabby said with a shrug.

Cooch was clearly warming up to the idea, pacing near the whiteboard, arms crossed over his chest as he thought. "That's good, though. We need to sell this. We need it not to look suspicious, because we have to make sure it gets ruled a good catch. We need to catch Mario by surprise, and nothing will be more surprising than being caught by a goalie."

"We can't tell him?" Tommy looked crushed, and Bancer and Melker visibly wilted.

"No way, Cooch is right," Eddie cut in. "It sucks ass, but if we warn Mario then he might not react the same. He might not fight it enough, or he might make it easier for him to be caught, and they'll think he's pulling a Duchene and embellishing the catch."

It made sense, and it was the best plan of action, but it still sat like lead in Burnzie's gut, knowing that they had to let Mario think that they weren't going to do everything in their power to get him back, to bring him home.

"Actually..."

Burnzie had known Patty long enough to know that he wasn't going to like whatever direction he was going in using that tone of voice.

"We may have to limit our contact with Mario."

If Burnzie had felt a weight in his stomach before, now it was like the floor had dropped out from under him. And he clearly wasn't alone.

"What?"

"Hell no!"

"Fuck that noise."

Most of the team was on their feet then fists tight with anger and faces twisted with righteous indignation.

But Patty was someone like Nabby or Jumbo, enough of a living legend that when he held up his hand, everyone gave him the space to talk, even if they didn't really like what he was trying to say.

"I'm not happy about it either," Patty said slowly, "But we have to recognize that if we actually pull this off and steal Mario back, the league is going to scrutinize the hell out of this. They're going to tear this thing apart trying to find evidence that Mario was in on it, because _nobody_ steals back a player that was taken from them, especially not a rookie. And if someone in Toronto wants to be a dick about it, they could even pull up footage of Mario chatting with us before the game and say it's evidence that he's friends with the guys who caught him and that it was all premeditated."

"Plenty of guys are friends with their old teams!" Dilly protested. "That's not weird, everyone does that!"

Patty grimaced and shook his head. "But their old teams don't try to catch them. If we want to pull this off, we need to get rid of any possible chance that they could try to call it a bad catch. And that might have to mean not contacting Mario, so that he's completely in the dark and they have no way of trying to claim he was in on it."

Burnzie couldn't find fault in anything that Patty said, but Christ, did he hate every word of it. Mario was an affectionate kid, and he was a talker. Especially now that he'd been thrown onto a new team full of strangers, right after what had to be a really emotionally distressing event for him, it was inevitable that he'd want to talk to someone right now, to try to process what had happened. To not be able to do that – or worse, to feel like none of the team gave enough of a shit about you to bother talking to you even to say goodbye – it would be devastating.

"It's for the best," Logan had repeated, gaze darting around the locker room until he'd made eye contact with every single person on the team. "It's shitty, but we're going to do this for Mario's sake so that we can get him back."

It was one thing to sullenly nod along that night, and another to receive Mario's text the next morning asking Burnzie to apologize to the team on his behalf.

Mario was apologizing for being caught. The rookie who'd only been with the team for two months, who had zero training on how not to get caught, was apologizing to the team of veterans who should have kept him safe. And Burnzie couldn't even respond to tell him how extremely wrong that sentiment was.

If the team wasn't motivated to make their catching drills work before, they definitely were after Burnzie told them about that text message.

It was decided that Gamby and Gregs had to act as stand-ins for Mario in their drills, "because you're all rookies and you're almost exactly the same size." They didn't mind this for maybe the first practice or so, until they realized how much of this role was letting themselves be steamrolled by goalies skating in at-speed who would then clumsily try to shove them over the boards.

Deller and Jonesy, for their parts, were rather thrilled with their new responsibilities. Because nobody knew which of them would be in net that night, they both needed to be equally prepared to be the catcher when the Sharks went to Washington.

Over the next few months they practiced just about every possible catching configuration they could manage. At any time of day you could find a group of guys huddled around a whiteboard or an iPad, bickering about the latest scenario someone had just dreamt up. They had to do everything they could to herd Mario to the boards, and as soon as Mario was within range the goalie was just going to have to book it for him, no matter how early it was in the game or what other action was happening on the ice.

"You will have to abandon your goal," Nabby had told his goalies in a very serious voice. "It will be left empty, even if other team has scoring chance, because then you have catching chance."

The way Jonesy and Deller had nodded was far too solemn, but then again, for goalies, maybe it was just solemn enough.

A contingency plan had of course then been put into place that whatever Sharks player was nearest to the net would do their best to protect it, "by any means necessary." Nobody quite knew what that was supposed to mean, but Jonesy's dead-eyed shark-stare had been enough to get everyone promising to try their best.

It was also decided that if they got into the last ten minutes of the game and Mario still hadn't been caught, then the goalies were to attempt the catch "whenever possible," a vague concept that apparently meant a mixture of gut instinct and whenever Nabby gave them some sort of signal. Burnzie wasn't sure what the signal was, but knowing the goalies, it was possibly telepathic.

Early on someone had proposed that they let DeBoer in on what they were doing, so that maybe the rest of the coaching staff could help with planning, but that idea was nixed early on for two reasons.

For one, if the coaching staff was supporting the catch, they'd want to make sure that the GM was on board too, and none of them could imagine even the kindest, most teal-bleeding GM in the world wanting to put so much effort into catching a rookie who had only been with the team for two months. And if management wasn't on board, then the coach would probably try to put a stop to their extra practices, if he knew about them.

For another, DeBoer was abruptly fired in December and swapped out for Boughner, and while everyone liked Boughner just fine, there was no way that a brand new head coach, and interim coach especially, would want to go against management like that.

And so not only did they not tell the coaching staff what they were up to, but they actively went out of their way to avoid letting on what they were up to. Technically Nabby was a coach, and if he thought it was a good idea not to tell the other coaches, they were just going to follow his lead.

The arena staff naturally knew what was going on, and the equipment staff, and the trainers figured it out pretty fast too – it was rather conspicuous that the whole team stayed late after every single practice, after all. It said something, Burnzie thought, that with so many people who knew about their harebrained scheme, not a single one blew them in to management.

Mario had touched more people than he'd ever realized.

Burnzie kept up with Mario's games. Maybe it was a bit of an exercise in masochism, punishing himself for failing to protect Mario by making himself watch Mario do well with another team, but a lot of it was just wanting to check on Mario in any way that he could. If calling or texting wasn't an option – and God, that unanswered text taunted him every time Burnzie looked at his messages – then he'd have to keep track of his stats instead.

In a hockey sense, he was doing fine. He continued demonstrating his potential, and even the most cynical of analysts would grudgingly admit that "his innate skill would make him a good feature in a multi-player trade deal."

But off the ice, he definitely seemed...different. Like, scarily different. Mario was interviewed after a win and didn't smile the entire time until the very end, when the interviewer congratulated him on the win and Mario pasted on the sickliest fake smile Burnzie had ever seen. Everything about his demeanor was unnatural: voice flat, eyes empty, face almost entirely expressionless. It was like watching an interview with Sidney Crosby, but with better curls.

Mario clearly was not doing well, but Burnzie couldn't even call him to ask him about his day. Hell, he couldn't even call one of the Caps and ask them to keep an eye on him.

All Burnzie could do was remind himself over and over that this was for the best, that once Mario was back with the Sharks he could fix whatever damage had been done. He might have to fistfight Jumbo on whose house he was moving into, because neither of them would let him go back to his glorified hotel room after having him stolen away like that, but either way, Mario would be well-cared-for once he was back in San Jose.

Telling himself that worked up until Dilly got traded to the Caps for a couple of draft picks.

It was a blow to lose Dilly to any team, but it felt particularly heinous to lose him to the Caps.

"Now we will steal two players," was Simmer's initial reaction to the trade news, and the look on his face gave Burnzie the suspicion that Simmer didn't have a whole lot of scruples about doing whatever he needed to make that come true.

The league likely wouldn't have agreed with whatever Simmer had in mind, though, because Tomas, who knew him best, took one look at his face and said, "Yes! But...maybe don't do _that_ though..."

"Nah, guys, don't worry about me." Dilly waved them off with a wink and a smile. "I'm in a contract year, I can save myself."

"You better come back," Erik demanded, pointing a finger at him.

"He will," Simmer said plainly. Nobody wanted to challenge his flat stare by suggesting otherwise. Simmer liked keeping things familiar, and that meant everyone had to be in their right place – especially the other defensemen. Having Mario taken had already disturbed him enough; Burnzie was a little nervous to see how he'd do with Dilly gone too.

"I'll be fine," Dilly insisted. "Look, this is great, I'll be like your man on the inside, eh? Your secret agent."

They mostly went for his smile, let him placate them into goodbye hugs and promises for news as soon as he got to D.C.

It was Jonesy who grabbed Dilly by the shoulders and hauled him in until their foreheads were touching.

"You're coming back." It was a statement, not a question.

Dilly smirked and ruffled Jonesy's hair.

"If I don't, you have my permission to practice your catching skills on me and drag me home."

He laughed when he said it, but Jonesy was deadly serious. "I don't need your permission."

And Burnzie was utterly convinced that Jonesy would make good on that promise if Dilly didn't make good on his.

They were all admittedly eagerly awaiting Dilly's news on Mario, and having seen enough of Mario's interviews to know something was seriously wrong, Burnzie should have been expecting the worst.

So he didn't know why he was so surprised when they_ received_ the worst.

"He thinks everybody hates him," Dilly said when he FaceTimed the locker room one day after their catching practice. His face was twisted up into an uncharacteristic frown, and it got worse the more he started to ramble. "Like, he thinks everyone is mad at him for getting caught and he blames himself for not knowing better, but he's also mad that _we're_ mad because he thinks that we should have trained him better to avoid getting caught, and mostly he's just upset that nobody ever talked to him after he left, and he honestly thinks that everybody hates him."

Burnzie had spent much of the past few months feeling like a jackass and a cad, that unanswered text from Mario mocking him every day, but he didn't think he'd ever felt it as keenly as in that moment.

"Tell him we don't!" Tomas burst out, wringing a baseball cap in his hands. "Tell him we like him lots!"

It made sense coming from Tomas, who couldn't stand the idea of people he cared about being upset or thinking ill of him, but more than a few guys in the room were nodding in agreement.

"I tried, but he didn't believe me because he hasn't heard from anybody on the team since he was caught." Dilly's face was a picture of misery, and Burnzie felt exactly the same way.

Nobody noticed when he slipped out of the room, but they'd probably notice pretty fast if he broke his hand punching a wall. He'd be tempted to do it too, because God knows he'd deserve a broken hand at this point, but the Sharks were down two good defensemen now and couldn't afford to lose him too, not with how atrocious their season already was. The fans deserved better and the team deserved better. And at the very least, Burnzie wanted to be on the ice when they played the Caps next week.

He started to head down the hall towards the weight room to search out a real punching bag when the door to the dressing room opened and closed behind him.

Somehow, without even looking, he knew it was Joe.

"Christ, I need a drink," Joe groaned, and Burnzie knew he was rubbing a hand over his beard as he said it. "Care to join me?"

It was enough to get Burnzie to stop walking, at least long enough to take a deep breath and scrub a hand over his eyes.

"Day drinking isn't going to fix anything," he said, though the offer was highly tempting.

When he dropped his hand and chanced a glance over his shoulder, Joe's smile was just a bit too brittle to be truly genuine, and yet that somehow made it more sincere. More relatable.

"It's never fixed anything, doesn't mean we shouldn't do it."

The look Burnzie gave him was one that he would never use around the rookies because he knew how it came off: a glare that dark from the big, bearded, toothless tatted-up guy would be enough to keep most people from even wanting to look in Burnzie's direction again.

But Joe was Joe, who'd never known shame nor fear, especially not where Burnzie was involved, and he was utterly unmoved by Burnzie's expression. Entertained, more likely, as he came up behind Burnzie and put a hand on his shoulder, made him turn around to face him properly.

"Look," Joe said in a low voice, "This isn't on you."

"Like hell it's not." Burnzie went to tug out of his grasp, but Joe wasn't cowed.

"Stop. Look at me."

Burnzie wanted to pull away, to refuse just to be contrary because he wanted to fight right now and if he couldn't fight himself, then anyone else would do. But Joe knew him too well, would never fall for that bullshit, and it was only because it was Joe that Burnzie gave him the time of day and did as he was bade.

To be frank, Joe looked just as exhausted as Burnzie felt, that sort of soul-deep weariness that hung over them all in a cloud, that Logan wore like an albatross around his neck. There were dark smudges under his eyes and his face had lost all hint of the playful glimmer of a moment ago – if it had ever truly been there to begin with.

"Listen," Joe said, somehow even quieter this time. "This is on all of us as a team. We all dropped the ball in preparing him, and we let him get caught, and that's why we're failing him right now too. This isn't just on you, it's on me, and everyone else in that room. We win and lose as a team. We fuck up as a team. We lost Mario as a team and we're gonna get him back as a team too."

It had been a few years since Joe was last captain, because all of Burnzie's best friends got to be captain of the San Jose Sharks at one point or another, but he hadn't lost a single bit of that captain-voice, that utter conviction in what he was saying. It was why the rookies flocked to Joe – he may not have worn the C anymore, but he was a natural leader.

Burnzie wanted to listen to him, so fucking badly, just turn his brain off and let a captain tell him what to do, but it felt like a cop-out, a free pass he didn't deserve.

"Mario is my rookie," Burnzie said, painfully aware of his use of the present-tense, "It's my fault he wasn't drilled on avoiding catches."

Joe wasn't having any of it. "And it's my job to train all the new kids so they don't get caught. It's just as much on me if not even more so because I trained all the other boys and somehow didn't think he'd be at risk for getting caught too. And I'm sure it's Cooch's fault for not checking up on how the rookies were trained to make sure everything was done adequately, and it's Bancer's fault for allowing the turnover that let the Caps dump the puck into the neutral zone for Mario to chase after, and it's Timo's fault for wearing 28 and making the Caps accidentally catch Mario when they were after him – we can stand here all day and I can pick out a reason to blame every single guy on this team, but that's not going to help Mario. Neither is going home and stewing in our guilt and personal failures. So if we want to help Mario, we're going to get our heads out of our asses and stop moping and make sure that this thing works so that _then_ we can get him back and start showing him how much we care. Got it?"

He eyed Burnzie for a moment, and Burnzie eyed him right back, because respecting Joe never meant that he automatically backed down for him. But loathe as he was to admit it, Joe did have good ideas sometimes, and in this instance, he was probably right. The rabid animal clawing at his sternum telling him to blame himself could wait at least another week before Burnzie indulged it properly.

"Does Cooch know he's delegating his captain speeches to you now?" Burnzie asked wearily. He didn't even realize he was rubbing at his face again until he was pulling his hand away.

Joe smirked and squeezed his shoulder.

"Cooch is one bad penalty kill away from martyring himself over the logo in the dressing room because he thinks that he's somehow singlehandedly responsible for tanking this team. I can delegate myself to give a few speeches here and there. That kid doesn't need another speaking engagement, he needs a fucking nap."

"Amen," Burnzie muttered under his breath. He sighed and clapped a big hand over the back of Joe's neck, squeezing it in thanks.

"You know, don't tell anyone I said this, but you might make a good captain one day," he told Joe.

Joe's eyes narrowed playfully and he used the hand on Burnzie's shoulder to shove him away.

"Nah, I'm not quite leadership material. Now _Captain Squatch_, that could be interesting..."

In the end it was easy, letting Joe badger him into focusing on something more productive than his own guilt complex. They practiced daily, the last week before they played the Caps. The goalies were racing each other to see who could put up the best times on carting their respective rookie to the boards, and everyone had taken a turn on the bench, helping the goalie to pull the rookie over the dashers. They'd even had Nabby pull his pads on and take a go at it a few times, because they all knew that if the team needed an emergency last-minute goaltender, there was a non-zero chance it would be Nabby getting shoved on the ice.

(Also, Nabby just seemed to take a genuine joy in scooping up a rather resigned Gregs and flipping him over the boards.)

Everyone knew their roles down to the second, and they all had a better spatial awareness for their goaltenders than ever before, because they all knew the plan: when Nabby gave the signal, their goalie would move, and that would be the only sign the guys on the ice had that the plan was being put into action.

It was going to work. It had to. There was no way that it wouldn't.

Burnzie told himself that over and over as he sat at that dinner table with Dilly and the guys the night before the game against the Caps, listening to Dilly rehash just how not-well Mario was.

"He's gonna be even more hurt nobody invited him to dinner," Burnzie muttered to Jumbo; Joe didn't even look as he reached out and patted Burnzie's hand like an unconcerned husband brushing off his wife.

"It'll be fine, dear, eat your vegetables."

Burnzie wasn't nervous before the game because he hadn't been nervous before a hockey game since juniors. But he was definitely more keyed up than usual: Eddie took one look at him in the dressing room and announced that Burnzie needed to "go run another lap or something, fuck, I can't even look at you."

He wouldn't let himself consider what would happen if this didn't work. It wasn't even possible; he couldn't conceive of it. They had so much riding on this working out, and it had nothing to do with the franchise's wellbeing.

The Sharks were not going to the playoffs. It wasn't in the cards for them this year, and they all knew it.

Patty was gone again, and they knew the chances of him being signed back to the Sharks weren't very probable. Jumbo would continue signing one-year contracts as long as his knees held out, but the team had to keep wanting him year after year. The media wanted to crucify just about every guy in the dressing room and with a new coach and a team edging toward a rebuild, nobody was truly safe. There was no guarantee that any of them would be on the team next year.

That's why they called it a fire sale.

Everybody got burned.

The Sharks were not going to the playoffs, but maybe, if they executed everything perfectly according to plan, they could get their baby Shark back.

That wasn't for the franchise, for the front office or the media or even the city of San Jose.

That was just for these guys on this team in this dressing room, who really loved their rookie defenseman and wanted to do right by him.

And may Lord Stanley strike him dead on the spot, Burnzie thought that this year, in this situation, with this team, that was more important than any chances at the Cup.

The first two periods, they played a normal hockey game. Granted, for the Sharks this season, a _normal hockey game_ meant that they were down 4-1 by the second intermission, but nobody was really paying attention to the score that game.

They all sat there in the dressing room, listening to Coach try to hype them up for the third, reviewing plays and talking about how if they woke up and played some damn hockey, they could actually protect their net and manage to score a few goals.

It was a nice sentiment, but his plays weren't the ones that everyone was mentally reviewing. Mario had sadly been nowhere near the Sharks bench; Dilly claimed that he hadn't gotten any extra training from the Caps on how not to get caught, so it was likely just coincidence. No matter how many times the Sharks dumped pucks out of their zone in the direction of their bench, Mario always managed to snag them before they reached their destination, or one of his teammates got there first.

Entering the third, they knew they were likely going to have to fall back on the contingency plan: as soon as Jonesy had a chance, he was going to book it to the benches and fling that kid over the boards like his life depended on it.

"You got this, man," Burnzie heard Deller tell Jonesy before they went on the ice for the third. The goalies both had their masks on even though Deller wasn't playing, their foreheads pressed together in some sort of little goalie ritual. "You know what to do. You're gonna bring our boy home."

Deller bopped his mask against Jonesy's in some sort of parting gesture, and when he moved away, Jonesy was bearing a shark-toothed smile through the cage of his mask.

The bench was electric at the start of the third, full of the frenetic energy of a team in Game Seven double OT in the Stanley Cup Finals. Timo scored early on, and then the team was alive, passes connecting, checks connecting even more. If the opportunity for the catch didn't come to them, then they were going to make it happen.

Burnzie was on the bench when Nabby gave the signal to Jonesy to make his move. With seven minutes left in the game, Nabby tilted his head at Jonesy, and Jonesy was off like a shot.

One of the Caps moved the puck from their end into the neutral zone and Mario was the one to chase it. He spotted Jonesy coming out of his net and continued skating in, clearly thinking that Jonesy would square up to him and block his shot. He passed the puck to Eller on the other side of the ice so that Eller could make the shot while Jonesy was trying to block Mario, and if this were a normal game and Jonesy was really just hanging out that far away from his net because he wanted to be dramatic and make saves midway to the blue line, then that would have been a good move. As it was, Eller picked up the puck and Noes was making a valiant if mad dash to the net to try to defend it, because they had to make good on their promise to do everything in their power to defend the net while their goalie went in for the catch.

And catch he fucking did, because Jonesy did not back into his net as Mario approached, but caught Mario visibly unawares when he instead charged him. He wrapped Mario up in his arms like some sort of padded goalie anaconda, cupping Mario's head with his glove and clutching him so that only a few glimpses of red were visible amongst the white and teal.

By the time the Caps noticed that Noes's beautiful breaching whale saves were not being relieved by the actual goaltender because the actual goaltender was absconding with their rookie, it was too late for them to intervene. The Caps fans were losing their shit and they could just keep on losing it, because Jonesy hoisted Mario sideways over the boards like the cutest sack of potatoes and Joe and Burnzie were there to catch him, settle him down across their laps, securely and completely over the boards and _a fucking San Jose Shark_.

After months of planning and anger and guilt, something burst free in Burnzie's chest that felt light and fluttery and overwhelming in the best way. It was better than hope.

It was joy.

Maybe they couldn't win the Cup this year, but they could win their baby Shark. They could do right by him.

They could take care of each other, if nothing else.

Burnzie had no illusions that this was going to be an easy transition for Mario. They had a lot of explanations to make and even more apologies. They'd hurt Mario in trying to help him, and even if he understood their motives, they were going to have to eat a lot of crow to undo the damage done.

But right now, exchanging positively _giddy_ looks with Joe over the stunned rookie splayed haphazardly across their laps, Burnzie knew that every single guy on this team would put in the work needed to make things right. They'd made it this far: through all the sweat and fear and doubt, they'd made it this far.

The hard part was done. They could see it through to the end, make amends and love the fuck out of their rookie so that he knew just how much he meant to them.

That fluttering feeling in Burnzie's chest turned warm and sunshine-bright.

It was a job he was looking forward to doing.

He looked down at Mario's big, baffled eyes, and he smiled.

"That was one hell of a long shift you took, kid. Took you three months to get back to the bench, eh?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FYI, when Mario took a bad hit in a game, Burnzie really did spend the next day after practice teaching him the right way to take a check so that he wouldn’t get hurt. Because this is a team who LOVES EACH OTHER.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [swedishgoaliemafia](https://swedishgoaliemafia.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Catch and Release](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23455024) by [LittleRedRobinHood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedRobinHood/pseuds/LittleRedRobinHood)


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